Dear Greyhound10,
I am a certified, full-time chess coach, so I hope I can help you. 
Everybody is different, so that's why there isn't only one general way to learn. First of all, you have to discover your biggest weaknesses in the game and start working on them. The most effective way for that is analysing your own games. Of course, if you are a beginner, you can't do it efficiently because you don't know too much about the game yet. There is a built-in engine on chess.com which can show you if a move is good or bad but the only problem that it can't explain you the plans, ideas behind the moves, so you won't know why is it so good or bad.
You can learn from books or Youtube channels as well, and maybe you can find a lot of useful information there but these sources are mostly general things and not personalized at all. That's why you need a good coach sooner or later if you really want to be better at chess. A good coach can help you with identifying your biggest weaknesses and explain everything, so you can leave your mistakes behind you. Of course, you won't apply everything immediately, this is a learning process (like learning languages), but if you are persistent and enthusiastic, you will achieve your goals.
In my opinion, chess has 4 main territories (openings, strategies, tactics/combinations and endgames). If you want to improve efficiently, you should improve all of these skills almost at the same time. That's what my training program is based on. My students really like it because the lessons are not boring (because we talk about more than one areas within one lesson) and they feel the improvement on the longer run. Of course, there are always ups and downs but this is completely normal in everyone's career.
I hope this is helpful for you. Good luck for your chess games!
I've always loved chess but never really understood too much about the game, mainly because I had nobody to play with so I could never play. So I got a chess.com account about just a little over 2 months ago (Late December I believe) and decided to start actually learning some chess. It was kind of slow at first, but I used the free 7 day premium trial and did as many lessons and tactics as I could in those 7 days to maximize its usage. That really started what I would call my "chess addiction." Since then I've been playing pretty much non-stop(some would argue an unhealthy amount lol) and have been trying to improve. Once the membership had ended my improvement drastically decreased(as i expected), since I do not have access to the tactics and lessons anymore, so I started watching some youtube videos and whatever I could find. I am not to where I want to be right now but I know it takes time to learn and I am happy with the improvement I have already made (currently stick around 1300ish in rapid and have beat all the bots up to Wally (1800) and drew Li (the 2000 bot) on challenge mode). I am always looking for ways to improve, which is why I am making this thread, and am wondering what are some more tips for me to improve(and if there are some adventurous souls out there maybe analyze a couple of my games to see what the biggest flaw in my play is, although I know that is a lot of work so I'm fine if no one does). I also think one of my problems is consistency, which I need to work on. I know tactic training is huge so I've downloaded some tactic trainers for me to use. Any feedback is appreciated, thanks!